Conflicts in Context and the Stability of Ownership
Research Project
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01.09.2013
- 31.08.2015
The goal of this project is to understand how behaviour in conflicts over resources and the likelihood that such conflicts occur are impacted by the fact that conflicts do not occur in isolation, but in an environment in which contestants face a sequence of opportunities to acquire resources (either by peaceful means or through conflict) and threats to the resources they already possess. In essence this means that neither the value of resources nor the opportunity cost of engaging in a conflict can be viewed as being exogenous; rather these must be determined in a self-consistent manner as part of the analysis. We plan to do so by embedding game theoretic models of bilateral conflict into the context of a dynamic search and matching model and studying the properties of the resulting equilibria. In particular, we aim to identify conditions under which individuals are more likely to use peaceful means to acquire resources and respect the ownership of resources, thus contributing to the economic theory of the emergence of stable ownership structures when property rights are not (perfectly) legally enforceable. In pursuing this agenda we can and will build on theoretical work in behavioural ecology which has investigated animal conflicts over territories in a framework akin to ours.
